Eduardo Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow is one of the most lauded books written about soccer to this day. Rather than providing a standard ‘nuts and bolts’ account of the game, forcing the reader to sift through countless names, dates and statistics, Galeano instead provides his readers with 150 short sketches about the game.… Read More »
A new documentary called “New Generation Queens” has just been released, focusing on a women’s soccer team in Zanzibar. It’s a fascinating look at sport, gender, and Islam. It can be watched on several platforms. It builds on the work of an earlier documentary from 2007, which was reviewed (along with several other films… Read More »
The French anthropologist Christian Bromberger has studied and written about football games as a kind of ritual that provides an “inexhaustible terrain of interpretation” for those who participate and watch. In his French-language book “Le match de football,” he studied how crowds experienced and interpreted games in the European football heartlands of Marseille, Milan, and… Read More »
During Friday afternoon’s student protests at Duke University, the crowd approaching the Allen Building (which was occupied that afternoon by nine students, who are still in the building as of today), broke into a very particular chant, as seen here in a video posted by the Duke Chronicle. They repeated the chant on Saturday… Read More »
Gail Newsham’s book In a League of Their Own! offers a unique account of the early history of women’s soccer in England. There is surprisingly little work on the history of women’s soccer in general, and particularly on its early period. Newsham’s research was pioneering in that she was able to gather together documentation on… Read More »
The French anthropologist Christian Bromberger has studied and written about football games as a kind of ritual that provides an “inexhaustible terrain of interpretation” for those who participate and watch. In his French-language book “Le match de football,” he studied how crowds experienced and interpreted games in the European football heartlands of Marseille, Milan, and… Read More »
(Originally posted at Africa is A Country on November 15th, 2015) The French national team player Patrice Evra was dribbling up the pitch when the second bomb exploded. Two minutes earlier, the same thing had happened: a loud, resonating explosion heard by the 65,000 fans gathered to watch a friendly match between Germany and France.… Read More »
Lassana Diarra issued a statement about the Paris attacks today. Here is the original. Below is a translation of the statement. “In the wake of the dramatic events that took place yesterday in Paris and Saint-Denis, it is with a heavy hard that I speak today. As you have perhaps read, I was personally touched… Read More »
Guest post by DeVon Thompson My name is DeVon, I am a soccer fan, a player and a hip-hop writer and blogger. I grew up in suburban America, a black girl who turned soccer at recess into a full-fledged childhood career with a local rec team. I was the quintessential suburban American soccer story, and… Read More »
I had the opportunity to help set up and edit and also contribute to a blog called “Upfront/Onside” set up at Sports Illustrated to cover the Women’s World Cup this summer in Canada. The blog brought together authors who had earlier gathered at the “Futures of Women’s Soccer” conference here at Duke in April. Here… Read More »